King Brude and St Columba

The Picts, a small,swarthy,marauding people,
probably of Celtic origin, occupied much of north-east Scotland from
the third century A.D. onwards.

Places of Pictish origin can be found around
Loch Ness. This, numerous and vigorous new race absorbed the old
inhabitants by force of numbers, and Inverness became the capital of
Northern Pictland.

In the western outskirts of Inverness stands
a massive hill crag - Craig Phadrig. The summit of this crag was once
the site of a great hill-fort, a mighty bastion of the early Pictish
kings. Craig Phadrig was a major Pictish stronghold in the north of
Scotland from the fifth century onwards. Towards the end of the sixth
century it was the fastness of one of the most powerful kings named in
the Pictish king-lists - King Bridei mac Maelchu, often called by the
anglicised name of 'Brude'.
In his his monumental history, the Venerable Bede describes King Bridei
as rex potentissimus, and he seems to have been the over-king of many
local kingdoms which comprised the core of the realm of 'Pictland', or
'Pictavia'; this realm extended from around the Firth of Forth as far
as Orkney (the name for the sea between Caithness and Orkney is
the'Pentland' Firth, which is a Norse word meaning 'Pictland').

It was to visit King Bridei, that Columba,
an Irish prince and priest (fresh from the founding of his monastery on
Iona), made his way up the Great Glen in 565 A.D.
At first he was received with suspicion. There had been a battle
between the Picts and the Dalriad Scots, with whom Columba had common
blood, and the Scots had been defeated. But Columba was a Christian,
with the power to work miracles. At Bridei's stronghold, an undoubted
Iron Age fort, situated on top of Craig Phadraig, legend has it,
Columba was rudely confronted by a locked gate, but its bolts could not
resist the sign of the cross. They sprang open to allow the visitor to
enter, to the king's amazement and alarm. From that moment onward
Bridei treated Columba with "growing deference and honour".

Columba, no doubt, did many deeds of charity
by stealth but he would also have realised the need for some more
ostentatious displays of his power. He was there, after all, to convert
the pagan Picts, to wean them from the influence of their own priests.
A chance to show the efficacy of his faith to an alien audience (as at
the king's locked gate) came one day when he was visiting Lochend, near
where the River Ness begins. He met a party of Picts who had just
buried a companion; they told Columba that the poor fellow had been
mauled to death by a water monster. Touched by compassion but properly
aware of his own value to the Church, he instructed a companion named
Mocumin to swim the river and commandeer a boat moored on the opposite
bank. Mocumin did so. Inevitably the Beast, having tasted blood, broke
the surface and made for him, and was within snapping distance when the
saint raised an admonitory hand and told it to stop. The beast swam
off, with undulating humps and bellowing most frightfully, while
Mocumin trembling with fear and cold, returned to his master. It was
indeed a famous miracle and one which seekers after the True Monster,
1400 years later, would give their souls to see re-enacted.

On [this and] a subsequent visit to Loch
Ness-side Columba was ever zealous in promoting the faith. His
biographer, St.Adamnan, writing from hearsay in the next century,gives
glowing reports of his activities in his Life of Saint Columba. A
dominant theme is the fierce conflict between his hero and the Pictish
priests, a war of attrition with the souls of the people as the booty.
When, for instance, Columba and his brethren were once singing vespers
outside King Bridei's royal house, the druids tried to shout him down,
but the saint was instantly supplied with such a strong voice that his
roared-out rendition of the forty-fifth psalm struck terror into all
who were present, including the king. By then, indeed, Bridei had a
healthy respect for the crusading Christian which was to ripen into
affection as the years went by, and which was reciprocated.

This period of early Scottish history has
long been known as the 'dark ages', not because the deeds of the time
were so dark but because the documentary sources are too meagre to shed
a great deal of light.